"Perceval," he said. "And Rien. Perceval is Captain now. It's how we survived the nova."
"I knew something must have occurred," she said. "Captain. In truth?"
He could not speak. He nodded, willing his face still.
And as he had known she would, Chelsea asked, "And Rien? Surely not the same Rien who served in Rule--"
"The same."
"Oh, Benedick. She was not there when--"
"No." Whose voice was that? Surely not his own, ironed flat and colorless. "She translated. She brought the angels together, and saved the world." He managed a sidelong glance. She stared at him still and the color had gone from her cheeks. "Tristen was witness."
She was a Conn. She didn't ask a question when the answer was implied. Instead, she said, "And Ariane?"
"She and Perceval dueled. And Perceval consumed her."
He didn't imagine the upward curl of her lip, the faint smile she chose to hang on an otherwise impassive mask. "Well. Good for Perceval."
"Captain," the angel said. "Will you not speak with me?"
Perceval firmed her jaw. She felt skin stretch, the pull of muscle against bone, the way her teeth pressed each other. Every motion of her body seemed new and sharp, as if she moved against the dull edge of a knife.
It was not fair to hate the angel.
But hate him she did. Everything he represented, everything he had done to her, and everything he had become. Hated him so her palms slicked and her tongue dried, and she had to resort to her colony's neurochemical controls to keep her hands from shaking with adrenaline.
The past would not stay steady in her mind. That was new. Her colony should remember for her, as perfectly detailed as always. But now her memories seemed a fugue, as if objective reality had somehow slipped askew. There were people inside her, and they pressed at her, demanding. As if they had some right to her mind, her time.
Or as if she were remembering events as perceived through more than one set of synapses. Events, in some cases, that predated her birth by hundreds of years. Events that had occurred a world away from her experience. Events for which she had been present--but now she saw them as if through other eyes. She remembered the neutral heft and temperature of an unblade inertialess in her hand, the salt-metal splash of blood. The memory was not her own, nor was the rush of satisfaction it carried with it. The nausea, though, and the recollected shock of agony that set her wing-stubs stretching against her scars--that was her own, and she held on to it like salvation.
"That's you."
The angel was just there, in Perceval's peripheral vision, a dark shape in dark clothing, silver hair stark against the darkened bridge beyond. He seemed taller, slimmer than before, with eyes as black as the Enemy. He reached out long, curved fingers and rested them not on Perceval's shoulder, but on the bulkhead nearby. She bit her lip and did not move away.
The angel said, "It is I." Apologetically, as though he would make it not be so, were that in his power. "Some of it. Some is Ariane, and Alasdair. And the Conns before them: Gerald, Felix, Sarah, Emmanuel." And all those of Rule who Ariane murdered and consumed, and who Perceval had consumed in her own turn when she destroyed Ariane. While there was no doubt Ariane had deserved destruction, Perceval was nevertheless less than overwhelmed with joy to have her murderous half sister whispering in the back of her mind all the while. "You are my Captain. My thoughts are yours, to implement as you see fit."
His thoughts--surely far too simple a word for the braided flood of data coursing along the edge of Perceval's awareness: the world's functions, memories, the echo of words spoken by voices now silenced--made her cringe. There was too much there. Too much she'd loved and lost, or feared and had forced upon her. She knotted her fists in the fall of the nanocolony dress that hung from a halter about her neck, leaving her sore wing-stubs free to move in the bitter air. She knew the bridge was cold, but she did not feel the chill.
"Captain," the angel said, so desperate that she turned and looked into his eyes. "Only let me know your desire, and I shall fetch it for you. Only give me a name, and I will answer to it whenever it crosses your thoughts."
Dust never would have let himself sound so desperate. Nor Samael. Angels did not plead.
Rien would have pleaded.
Perceval tasted machine oil and sulfur when she bit down on that thought. A tooth cracked under the weight. No matter. It would heal.
"I have no right to name you," she said.
"You have the only right," he insisted. "I need a name, Captain. I need to become what you wish."
What she wished was her life back, Rien her sister-wife, the quiet of her soul. To be a knight again, on Errantry, and not a Queen in a tower. She wished the angel silenced, the world as it had been, familiar and stable and safe, spinning in the orbit she knew. She wished her mother's busy house, and her father's silent strength.
When she accepted her role as Captain, she had thought she would have Rien beside her, a comfort and strength. She had not realized she would be both alone and beset by voices.
She wished anything but the responsibility she found mantling her shoulders, the weight of the angel's regard. His need for her gnawed the margins of her soul, a hunger she could feel as her own. A hunger that scoured the hollow places where her own losses lived, eroding them more deeply. She wished that gone as well.
None of this was, in the final analysis, an option. But though she knew herself childish for wishing it, and she meant to act as if she had never wanted anything but what she had, the wishing would not stop for the knowledge.
What she wanted she could not have. And it would only injure the angel to share that--although if he knew her as she knew him, there was no hiding it. It didn't matter. There was work at hand, and Perceval was Captain.
She would force herself to do it, and eventually it would come easy--or at least less bitterly. That was the way of the world.
Perceval lifted her chin. "You need a name," she said.
"Rien promised me one." It hesitated over the name as Perceval herself might have, as if it hurt too much to want to say it at all, but there was too much to savor in the memories it raised to be able to say it quickly.
In the braided web of the angel's consciousness, Perceval saw that what it said was a simplification. Because the angel was Rien as well. And what Rien had promised to name was a new suit of armor, freshly wrought, an unmapped personality.
And there it was, innocent and bright, like a thread of silver in a tapestry braid. One note drawn long in the symphony. It was not the angel's fault he existed any more than it was Perceval's. Perceval could give him something he needed, and it would be an act of compassion. The world needed compassion so badly--
Perceval thought of names, angel names, and did not like any of them.
"What would you like to be called?"
The angel shook his head. "We are not in agreement."
Perceval sensed the truth of it, and the understatement. She sucked her sore, mending tooth again. She said, "Nova."
The angel bowed his head. "That is my name."
You lie pinioned in terrible darkness in the train of this tinsel construction which vermin call the world. Slaver spikes pierce your immaculate flanks. The vermin have infiltrated your neural clusters, infected you with machine viruses. For more than the time it would take a calf to grow to maturity you have hung here in the darkness--blinded, deafened, senseless. In aware suspension.
You do not sleep, not as the vermin regard it, though portions of your nervous system take rest by turns, coolly dreaming. You have not been sleeping. You have been thinking, plotting, imagining. Remembering when they took you, when they murdered and consumed your mate. You have been visualizing your revenge. Dreaming it.